Various services are available to host or distribute content from personal computers, tablets, and mobile devices. Some examples of currently existing ways to distribute content include proprietary content sharing services such as Flickr®, Twitter®, YouTube®, iMessage®, WordPress®, Picasa®, or other content sharing services that may be used to share or distribute content. Additionally, generic communication services such as short messaging service (SMS) or email, may be used. These services often have required user registration and setup procedures to complete before using the sharing service and a user may be required to manually log in/connect to the service after an account is established.
For example, in order to share images on Flickr's® image service, a user must first create an account and sign into Flickr's® service (e.g., a Flickr® remote server) through a dedicated application, web browser or mobile device. Registering for the Flickr® content service may require a different registration process and account than Twitter's® unrelated content sharing service. Users may manage multiple accounts to share content across multiple sharing services, which requires users to manually perform a number of tedious steps, and can result in user discouragement or frustration.
To share content in one program with a number of different content sharing services may require exiting from the photo editing application (e.g., closing, minimizing or switching contexts). Then, a user must open or access each content sharing service in a proprietary sharing application or a web browser. Next, the user will have to log into each account using at least a user name and password. Finally, the user will have to locate the images on their personal computer, tablet, or mobile device. Locating the images may require performing a number of searches on the computer for the filename (if known), or manually navigating through folders in a file system (e.g., with Finder®, Microsoft Internet Explorer®, or similar file browser/manager). Some file browsers do not display thumbnail previews of images and video for the particular file type (e.g., .nef, .dng, cn2, other raw image files, or video requiring uninstalled plugins or codecs), making manual navigation of a file system to locate a particular file even more time consuming. If the targeted image or video files are eventually located on the file system, the images can be selected and copied into the proprietary sharing application or web browser. The user can switch back to the photo editing application to continue the work that was resumed.
Therefore, in order to improve efficiency and user experience, an improved way to share content is needed.